Shifting from Leadership to Teamship with Keith Ferrazzi

Hello and welcome back to Franklin Covey's twice-weekly podcast, On Leadership with Scott Miller, 6 years and nearly 500 episodes taped, where on Tuesdays and Fridays we curate great conversations with people from all different walks of life designed to make you a better leader. Today our guest is Keith Ferrazzi. You know him as a seminal author, speaker, coach, and consultant. The world knows him as the author of the book Never Eat Alone, and today we are interviewing him for a second time this year on his new book just released called Never Lead Alone. The tagline is 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship. Keith Ferrazzi, welcome back. Thank you.

I, Scott, am so excited to be here and honored that you have me back so soon. Although when I hear that you've got 2 shows a week, I'm not sure that I'm as special as I used to think I was.

Well, we're dedicating many of them to you this month, so it's okay. You have a wrap on that as well. Keith, great to have you back. I mean, I've been a fan of yours for decades. You were gracious enough to come back twice this year because Franklin Covey is so interested in the topic of leadership and teenship. In fact, our CEO and our Chief Product Officer, most of the executive team is reading your book right now. You've just launched this book. I was in Orlando yesterday where I saw it on the shelves of 2 bookstores, one independent bookstore and one at Barnes& Noble. You are making the rounds on making this book a bestseller. Let's rewind a little bit because the world, I think, knows of you from your first significant book, Never Eat Alone, but that was an interesting pivot in a career because before that you weren't known as an author per se. You had a remarkable academic and professional career. Will you rewind a couple of decades? You went to school where? Don't be shy. You did a couple of cool things prior to your first book and then talk about what's happened since then.

So, poor kid from Pittsburgh who found his way through the grace of some mentorship and some very helpful relationships at both Yale and Harvard Business School. Um, and it was a career climbing the ladder with the, with the grace of, again, amazing mentorship, some beautiful relationships that got me to be the youngest partner at Deloitte, um, the chief marketing officer of Deloitte, chief marketing officer at Starwood Hotels, etc., etc., and, uh, and an entrepreneur working for some amazing investors like Michael Milken and others. And when I was asked to write a book on that topic, that's what created the book, uh, Never Eat Alone. And the basis of that book was that relationships and opportunities and doors would open if you led with generosity, if you led with authenticity. But it, it sparked a curiosity in me that asked, for what other reasons are relationships critical in our life? How else could relationships be impactful? And I started to study not broad networks, but I started to study small groups. How do small groups of people working in service of each other transform lives? And the book was called Who's Got Your Back? But what it did is it made me realize how powerful the 3 closest people in your life are to your success. These relationships that I call co-elevating, these lifeline relationships that are pushing each other higher. And the research around that started to just pivot everything for me and made me realize how powerful small groups are. And I wanted to study the importance of that, which ultimately germinated over 20 years in what we're talking about today, which is high-performing teams. How can a group of people not let each other fail? How can a group of people be so committed to the mission and each other that that they're able to do 10x what other people are able to do. And that's 20 years of research is what this book is the culmination of. And, you know, I have such deep respect for the Franklin Covey organization and the work you've done around leadership. And the reason I've been so excited more recently, even now than before, about Franklin Covey is our mutual interest in the migration of just focusing on leadership And the interest in focusing on teamship, which has been under-indexed, I think we both believe.

Keith, your book Never Eat Alone is, you know, one of the top bestselling, most influential books in the last 20 years in the nonfiction space. Fast forward 20-plus years, of all the books you could have kind of capstoned with, why did you pick leadership and teamship You have your fingers in a lot of different topics. You coach and consult with some of the biggest CIOs, CHROs, CEOs in the world. Why did your sort of divining rod take you to this topic?

Well, it's so many different answers to that question, and I'll try to break them down. One of them is in this volatile world that we're living in today, this AI-infused world we're living in today, the partnership between humans and technology has never been so important. But what I'm seeing in organizations that are struggling with transformation, struggling with the pace of change, is that they need to not hunker down in their silos, but they need to start re-engineering not the relationship between humans and technology, but we need to double down on re-engineering the relationship among humans. We have indexed for decades now too much on leadership alone. I totally get it why it's important to get leaders to give good feedback. But I'll tell you, when I see transformation happen, it's not by just waiting for a leader to give you feedback. It's when teams are giving each other feedback. The idea of a leader holding a team accountable, of course, that's important. But when I see transformation occur, It's when teams are holding each other accountable. When we're beleaguered in the pace of change and we're worried that the leaders are being good at making sure that the energy of the team is sustained and strong. But the best way to do that is for the leader to make sure that the team has each other's back, that the team owns each other's energy, that there's what I call a social contract among the team that they're the ones taking care of each other. They're the ones crossing the finish line together, not independently and waiting for everybody else to catch up, but looking behind and saying, if I have to do something to make sure that the team crosses with me so that we can achieve these disproportionate 10x kind of, kind of goals, that's what's needed right now. We are so in need of teamship, and it's not even been on the agenda for the Not even been on the agenda for the last few decades.

Keith, as you think about— I mean, the role of leadership isn't going away. You're not elevating it or minimizing it. What are leaders, formal leaders of teams, going to need to do differently if they buy into this idea of teamship? Like maybe perhaps mindset shifts, skill set shifts?

I love that. Thank you so much. Well, you know my— we've talked privately and on air about this. The mindset is important, but I'm an agent of change and transformation. My job is to get people to change. When I'm trying to change a mindset, I don't change people's thinking. There's a great phrase, you don't think your way to a new way of acting, you act your way to a new way of thinking. What we're trying to do for leaders is something very simple. I do want to change mindsets. I do want to change culture. I do want to change radically, uh, entire ways of collaborating and working inside of organizations. But I'm not going to do that by preaching on these broad concepts. The research we've done for 20 years has identified the most critical shifts that a team needs to make to be disruptive and exceptional. Most teams, to be honest with you, in our research are mediocre. Our data shows that on a scale of 0 to 5, the average team is conflict avoidant and about a 2 in terms of its willingness to aggressively challenge each other when it's risky, as opposed to the meeting after the meeting, the conversation in the hallway, the private DM, even worse, the talking behind each other's back. The average team is mediocre when it comes to having a healthy, caring challenge culture. Now, if that's true, how am I going to get that to change? What we've done in the book is we've curated a series of shifts. Each chapter is a shift that the team needs to make from conflict avoidance to candor, right? From resilience being an individual responsibility to it being a team responsibility, from scarce praise to strong celebration, to episodic relationship building when we're walking down hallways to purposeful connectedness that's managed even in a hybrid world, from old-school meetings to 21st century technology collaboration. There's 10 critical shifts. Each one of those shifts have some really simple practices. You know, I'll give you the simplest. We were just talking about candor. If I'm a leader and I really do believe that conflict avoidance is killing innovation, It is stomping down what's in the room and what I've already paid for, which is brilliant insights that don't get out on the table. If I sit there and I say, you know what, this is a, this is a tough conversation. I'm not sure we're hearing everyone's real voice. I want to do a candor break. A candor break is when a leader says, everybody just talk in twos. You could go to breakout rooms or just do it in a room. Talk in twos. I want to know what's not being said that needs to be said in this room. Now, that is a simple practice. And if you put it on an agenda of a meeting, we're going to do a candor break halfway through, or 3 quarters of the way through while we still have time to recover, we're going to do a candor break. If that's just a constant agenda that the chief of staff always puts on there, people will go and have the authentic conversation. Psychological safety in small group conversations of 2 goes up 85%. And then when it comes back into the room, The conversation's game-changing. The courage to hear what people are thinking is true leadership. That's just a simple example. It's a very big shift from conflict avoidance to candor, but it's a simple practice. And I've got 8 practices just in the candor area listed in the book that you can eat like popcorn and try on as a team. And so, as leaders, we've got to become curious to step up and expect more from our team. As leaders, we've got to take the patience and the time to do the simplest little practices that turn into habits. Now, I know that our schedules are inundated. I know that the time that we have to do new things feels scarce and sparse, but that's why we broke these practices down into the simplistic little things that I, over 20, 4 years of research have witnessed are disproportionately powerful to make your team successful. These little practices that you can try on that will be game-changing for your end state, for your innovation cycles, for your cycle time of getting stuff done, for the new product innovations, for, you know, results and outcomes being transformational as opposed to, you know, maintaining the status quo. All of that, all of that, all of that, all of that is game-changing with simple practices. Last thing I'll say is culture change is not tough. Mindset change is not tough, but you just have to change it from the practice, from the simple new habits.

Keith, one of the 10 shifts you identify in your new book, you call it the shift from serendipitous relationships to purposeful team bond building. I mean, it sounds great. What does that look like, sound like, feel like in a typical Fortune 5000 company?

Well, I'll give you the before and the after, and it's something that we're, we're really struggling with and experiencing right now in many, many companies. We are struggling with remote and hybrid work, and we're asking ourselves, how do we, how do we deal with the fact when people are remote and hybrid that we just don't feel as connected? Our cultural elements, our Our sense of esprit de corps, collaboration, et cetera, is dissipating. And that's true because we showed that during the pandemic, the connectedness of teams on a scale of 0 to 5 went from an average of 2.8 to 2.3. Why? Because we stopped practicing serendipity bonding. Serendipity bonding is what happens when you're all in the offices together and you walk down a hallway You see each other in a break room, you connect, you bond, et cetera. Well, as a result, I could see why many executives would say, get my team back to the office. There is another option. And I'm not trying to debate whether you should be in or out of the office. That's a policy discussion, which I don't care about as much as I do re-engineering work. I'm trying to re-engineer outcomes through re-engineering work. Where you do it is your call. I can promise you, you can do it effectively in many different ways. If you start practicing something called an energy check, where once let's call it once once a month even once a week would be nice but once a month even everybody on the team not episodically serendipitously who you bump into but everybody on the team checks in and says I'll tell you my energy these days you know on a scale of zero to five it's a it's a three because a little worried about my mom who's got some health issues. I've got a real struggle with my son right now. We've got this big project at work and we're gonna lose a critical member of the team. Whatever it is, right? I mean, what is draining your energy? If you give it a number and you say what's draining your energy, what happens is you're building relational empathy among the team. But more than that, if you can actually commit as a teammate to care about each other and commit to lift each other's energy, And to boost each other up, then that commitment leaves the leader not having to be the only one running around taking care of everybody. So, you've got a double here. You've got empathy and bonding that gets created among the team through a simple practice. And you also have the sustaining of the group's energy through mutual support and that social contract that happens in that practice. So, the simplest little practice done, which doesn't take more than 10 minutes of a meeting, at least it can. Or you could do it in a much longer form over a nice dinner instead of paying for all of your people to go out for dinner, which I see at these offsites all the time, and everybody just lets them do small talk and not have— not really have meaningful conversations. All of these are shifting from what we used to do serendipitously to what we need to do purposefully, and that purposefulness is game-changing. And unfortunately, most leaders don't even know or have the practices. We're giving them the best practices in this book.

Keith, your experience is second to none when it comes to working on a broad portfolio of organizations around the world, coaching CEOs, consulting with strategy. I want to flip out of the book for a moment. When you think about the organizations that have magnetic cultures where people come and stay and stay engaged and refer in their high-talented friends, where their client portfolio is growing, where their profitability but their, their purpose and mission are on fire. Generally speaking, in 2024 moving into 2025, what are the commonalities of these high-performance organizations where retention is less an issue because of what it is they're doing? Kind of just open letter to the world on this.

Sure. And I apologize, I will be taking us back to the book because I think the answer is embedded as a thread throughout each of the chapters. I'm gonna use one example of a company that is very much what you just talked about. It's called e.l.f. Beauty, E-L-F Beauty. It's a company that that is doubling in market cap, market share consistently growing in an industry that's shrinking, in an industry where the big competitors, the juggernauts in the beauty industry, are a bit on the ropes. And all of them— none of them point to each other as the competition anymore. They're pointing to e.l.f. Now, why is this? First of all, it's how they hire. There is no question that the seeking a group of individuals which with a specific predisposition to these 10 shifts. I want to hire people that are more candid in their nature. I want to hire people who are more inclusive and deeply curious and feel the need to be transformative, not status quo. I want to hire people who really do care about their peers and have experiences. So the hiring is interesting, but then— That's the filter. But then what they do is, as onboarding, what they say to the, the group of people that they're hiring, they say, you're going to grow further and faster than you ever have in your life here. And in exchange, you are not allowed to be defensive. In fact, you've got to seek coaching from every one of your peers. Your peers are your coaches. You need to be coaching. You will never hold anything back. You will care so much and love each other so much and be committed to each other so much. that you will give each other feedback on performance, ideas, style, competencies. We're not going to let each other fail here right now. That's extraordinary. That is extraordinary. And a commitment to high-performing team culture where that peer-to-peer— the word I mentioned before is co-elevation— committed to a shared mission but committed to each other as much to push each other higher That's an earmark of those extraordinary cultures. And I have to say, it doesn't— you think that it has to be a culture of great purpose, doing meaningful things in the world, et cetera. People find purpose in winning and people find purpose in winning together. And any company, even if you're a nuts and bolts manufacturer somewhere, any company can manifest a transformational vision of going from where we are today to 10x-ing it while we take our people with you. That, I think, is the earmark that I've seen. And each chapter is anchored with a hero story like Elf of a company that's done it once successfully for a particular area that they— that I've identified their practices and that I want to bring In fact, let's

go deeper on that. I learned from you in the book, ELF actually stands for ears, lips, and face, ELF Beauty. And you share an encounter that you had, I believe it was with— was it a receptionist and something? And then you actually talked to, I think it was with the founder about it. And there was an interesting story about a dynamic that represented their culture there. If you want to share that, it would be fantastic.

Yeah, I mean, look, there's so many stories about ELF I've had the blessing of sharing. Being invited in to study that organization. But, you know, look, I'll tell you something. I've, I've sat in a lot of companies, um, as their coach of the executive team, and in this one, I was on my heels. I was like, holy cow, you know, the, the, the 2 individuals that I saw interact were so direct that I thought that perhaps underlying it could have been animosity. And what I found as I discovered and talked to each individual, asked how they felt about the exchange, et cetera, what I felt was love and commitment. It was beautiful. It was like the equivalent that I would say is like an Italian Thanksgiving dinner, wrestling, throwing barbs, But all out of love and commitment to each other, to the family, to the individual, to the aspiration, et cetera. You know, it's so beautiful and powerful when I see it that even myself that coaches to these elements, you know, this one took me to another level.

Keith, let's talk about agile, 'cause it's a word you hear a lot, but unless you are, you know, a Fortune 5000 or a, you know, top-level Inc. 5000, You may not understand its application or even really what it means. One of your shifts is shifting from— shifting to Agile as the new operating system for your team. Break that down a little bit for perhaps people that may not have a clear view.

I'll make it so simple. Operating system of my life is what Agile has become. Agile is really— I have a dream. I have a dream that this intellectual property that, you know, that I wrote about in this book will transform teams in the largest corporations of the world and save millions of families' jobs, and that it will be used as the booster rocket for disruptive companies innovating with entirely new areas inside of, inside of the world. And I dream that it will be used by governments on how to work more effectively together across parties. I dream that it will be— teamship is a principle that could even help disenfranchised communities, foster kids, and others team up to elevate each other. So I have these dreams, and that kind of a dream is only going to be achieved Through truly thinking big, which I'm doing, but then starting small. And what does my next month look like? I call it a sprint. In the next month, I've broken this big vision into 5 critical hills. One of those critical hills is to identify brilliant organizations like Franklin Covey that I could potentially partner with to get the message out to a broader audience, right? Yeah. Okay, so looking at those partnerships, what do I need to do in the next month in order to achieve that particular big hill? Great. Now I sprint like heck to do that, and I pause. And at the end of the month, I team out. I ask all my advisors, I ask all members of my team, however I want to define that— my own company, advisors from the outside. Team has nothing to do with an org chart. This has to do with Who is helping me think about this big hill? And I say to them, okay, in this past month, here's what I've achieved. Here's where I'm still struggling. I've talked to these individuals. Here's where I'm struggling. Here's new information I've gotten. And here's where I think I'm going for the next month. And the team beats me up, stress tests me. Here, I challenge you for this. I see this risk. You don't see this risk. What about this? Here's an idea. I'd be happy to help you here. So this process of stress testing at the end of simple agile sprints in your life on any goal that you have, whatever it is, business, personal, and otherwise, philanthropic, those simple agile sprints, stress testing, then allowing you to step back, take a breath and say, okay, here's what I've learned. Now I'm gonna reassess and reboot my next month Always with that eye toward that bigger vision. If you do that and you adopt that in your life, you will always stay on track and you won't veer off. You won't wake up 6 months into a year and realize that we're not going to make the numbers at the end of the year. We're not going to wake up having been stilted and, and castrated in action and not having moved forward effectively on a dream that you have. How many people have dreams that stay dreams? Right? Breaking life down into simple agile sprints where at the end of it, you bring in all the information that's possible, you digest that information, and you figure out what the next sprint is, always staying on the North Star. That's so simple and it's so powerful. And what I saw is that all of the great companies and the great teams innately practice this agile. They innately practiced those agile principles, and that's why they were getting disproportionate outcomes from others. You don't have to like bring in some big expensive coaches or read a ton of books. There are simple principles and then practices that you adopt to start believing that agile becomes your operating system.

Keith, for the executive leaders, senior leaders, even C-suite members, board members that are listening or watching to our conversation right now and they appreciate your point of view, the future aspect of where you think organizations must go with new demographics and team members and global competition and the way in which we're now working differently physically, is there a starting point? Is there a, say, hey, this is where you should start? So when you finish this book, this is kind of the first thing you tackle Is it circumstantial, situational? What's kind of the governing principle of moving from leadership to teamship?

Yeah, thank you for that. The— I think the answer is move to what moves you, in that you read the book, there's gonna be a couple of practices that really call to you. I was speaking this morning to an old buddy of mine Used to be an executive of a big company that I coached his team, and now he's the CEO of a middle market, very successful business. And he had a pre-release version of the book, and he had read it, and he said, you know, I'm talking to him today. He said, "Listen, you know, I've already just started picking up the following few practices. I'm absolutely practicing stress testing. I think it's I've replaced anybody who was about to do a report out." I've said, listen, we're not doing your report out on your initiative. We're going to make sure we stress test it. So everybody pay attention because when we're done listening to what she has to share, we're all going to break into small rooms and say, what are they missing? Where do we challenge them? What innovations would you offer, ideas, and any offers of support or help? So you've, you've squeezed the juice out of the entire team every single time. A critical initiative is reported, and that person's elevated further and faster because they get the benefit of the team's coaching. And then the other thing they might pick is, you know, I'm going to do the energy check idea that you were suggesting. Both of those really resonated with me. One is relational and the other one is around collaboration. And by the way, I'm also going to do— I'm also going to do a little bit more collaboration in asynchronous documents. Because meetings are a real downer for organizations trying to make stuff happen fast. And if you showed up in a meeting and started having a dialogue, it could take 2 or 3 meetings to finish the conversation. If you ask people in advance of a meeting, go into a Google Doc or Teams and write, here's what I think the real problem is we're facing, and here's what I think is a bold solution. And everybody reads everybody else's answer, and then we come into the room, we could land the plane in one meeting. So just doing what chapter 6 talks about and using 21st century collaboration tools and meeting shifting and not relying on meeting as the primary form of collaboration. So I've just given you 3 simple practices that a lot of people seem to resonate with. One from the bonding chapter, um, one from the candor chapter and one from the innovate and collaborate in the 21st century differently with tools chapter. And, you know, it's— you're going to find your own, what calls to you. And the team will too. If the whole team reads the book, which is why we created a video series that we give away to any team that wants to read the book together. And, you know, it's me giving a A 7-minute inspirational talk about each chapter as you go through it and giving some advice, teaching you how to do the diagnostic. I mean, that's the other thing. Most teams don't measure how successful they are. We have a great diagnostic where a team working together would say, okay, on a scale of 0 to 5, how much do we challenge each other? Oh gosh, 2. Okay, on a scale of 0 to 5, how strong are our relationships? Oh, 2.8. They should be better than that, right? On a scale of 0 to 5, how good are our meetings? Oh gosh, a 1? Okay, we're going to need to work on that. So, if we could create a benchmark, that's another thing. So, I don't know. I could keep going on and on. These are the things that I'm told are some of the earliest, simplest things to pick up. But there's 37 practices, Scott, 37 practices in the book which people can pick and choose from. like eating popcorns and M&Ms and decide which ones they like the best.

If there was ever a celebrity-author mashup collaboration, I would see a book between Kim Scott, Radical Candor, and Keith Ferrazzi, Never Lead Alone, to write a book where you take the candor conversation together further because the most pervasive cultural leadership competency that I think is lacking across organizations is leaders who can create A safe environment where everyone can tell the truth, they can disagree respectfully to lift everyone's performance. I think it is a massively lacking competency because of people's origin stories, their conflict avoidance. You've already written it according to the video camera. Tell me about that for those who are listening on audio.

Right here, right here. So I was just with Kim and she and I were listening to each other's keynotes at an event And we walked away and said, you know, let's start writing something. Well,

wait, I wanna agent that book. That was my idea. Hold on, hold on, hold

on. Well, it's starting as an op-ed for one of the important media outlets, so.

Isn't that intriguing that you and Kim, I did not know this, I had no knowledge of this, but it just seems like you have this beautiful complementary, with an I and an E, You have a field of experience that could be enormously helpful to people in the future. Keith, you speak for a living as well as consult and write. You are recently in Asia. You were recently in Middle East. When companies hire you to keynote speak, like, what's your sweet spot? When you hit the ball out of the park, what happens? Like, what's the topic and the situation that companies bring you in to keynote on?

You know, I don't know if this is true, but I think I'm a little unique in how I think of my role as a speaker for an organization. I don't think of myself as an entertainer whose job it is to reveal information that inspires, etc. Hopefully I'll be inspirational. Hopefully I'll have great information. I do what I call a challenge talk. What I do is I want to make sure that I listen to the executives who have brought me in. The, you know, CEO of the organization, the head of strategy, head of HR, um, the division president, whoever it is. I want to hear and I want to do my homework and understand what are the aspirations of this leadership, the leadership team, for how this group, this audience will behave differently in, uh, in 18 months. And what will they be most excited about practicing tomorrow as a— on their way to reinventing the organization in the next months? And I stand in front of that audience bringing— picking and choosing from all of the practices and the insights that I know about high-performance teamship. And I make sure that every single person in that room sees themselves as a leader in the transformation. that will meet the aspiration of the executive that's hired me. And that every single person is aiming at the aspiration of that leader and what they need to do to lead. The great thing about teamship is that it's not organized around org charts. It's in service of any individual with a vision on how they're going to achieve transformation and the need to build a team that will achieve that no matter where the boundaries of the organization are, cutting across silos, etc. So I believe that my role is the inspirer of individual and collective change in the room. And I consistently hear that I'm a real agitator and an activator for transformation in individuals. You know, just the other day I was giving a talk And it happened to be, you know, large top leaders of the organization. And, um, and I said, listen, you've got, you've got tonight's dinner to find the 3 most important teammates to begin to enact what your vision is for how you think you can meet what the CEO said is the direction of this company. So what's your vision? Who's your team? And how do we use this meeting that's created right now to begin to initiate and activate that. And that could be virtual or physical. This one happened to be physical. So I think what I do is I do challenge talks. I do challenge talks that are leading and driving to real action, leveraging all the tools of the 5 books that I've written.

And in fact, number 1 New York Times bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, your most current book is called Never Lead. Alone: 10 Shifts from Leadership to Teamship. Thanks for your time today.

Scott, it is always a pleasure, a real blessing. Thank you.

And we'll see you back here next week for a new conversation on leadership.